This is huge: Deschutes County is now posting restaurant inspection scores online and publicly available. Go here to see them.

Every restaurant in the County—even places that are not nominally restaurants, like hotels, or small food counters in other types of establishments—is online, it looks like. You can search by name, city, score, and address, and you can click through to the details for each restaurant, which include:

• The comments and details of each violation;
• Date of inspection(s) and subsequent follow-up re-inspection(s);
• Google Map of the establishment;
• Graphed view of the score(s);
• And, of course, the actual score.

Each restaurant is scored on a scale of 100—100 being the best possible score. Each violation reduces the total score, and restaurant scoring less than 70 get the dreaded "Failed to Comply" sticker.

So far, it’s been very interesting to page through all the results… there have been some surprises.

However, the site comes with the following disclaimers:

[From the press release]
Posting restaurant inspection scores is not in any way meant to disparage or benefit any restaurant in Deschutes County. The scores are a reflection of the conditions observed by the health inspector on the day she or he made that inspection.

[From the site]
It must be noted that scores don’t always tell the full story of how a restaurant is performing with regard to safe food handling practices. The scoring system is not perfect and neither are health inspectors or restaurant operators. A low scoring restaurant may never make anyone sick or a high-scoring restaurant may have an outbreak tomorrow. Foodborne illness is an inexact science with MANY risk factors that influence how, when, where, and why an outbreak occurs.